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Nouveau Performance Is Faster With Linux 3.12

10-15-2013, 08:10 PM

Phoronix: Nouveau Performance Is Faster With Linux 3.12

In following the AMD Radeon performance is incredible on Linux 3.12 article that benchmarked ten different AMD graphics cards on the Linux kernel, followed by the reason why AMD Radeon graphics are faster on Linux 3.12, here's now some benchmarks of the open-source NVIDIA driver with GeForce graphics cards. The testing in this article is a few NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with the Nouveau driver when comparing the Linux 3.11 and 3.12 kernels in a similar fashion to the AMD Linux OpenGL performance testing. Like the AMD results, there are some notable gains to find with the yet-to-be-released 3.12 kernel.

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Up next in my Linux 3.12 kernel performance investigation will likely be binary driver tests and power consumption monitoring.

Very interesting indeed.
Lat time I checked (~year ago), 'ondemand' had, err, interesting effect on the nVidia binary driver performance. While I could not really measure it, 'performance' seemed to have less shuttering.
On the other hand, leaving a dual Xeon beast with performance had a noticeable impact on my power usage under medium loads (multiple active VMs), so I stayed with ondemand.

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Couple years ago I found that VDPAU acceleration was broken (too slow) with cpufreq ondemand. It took me a long time to find the cause of the problem. The CPU usage always stayed low, but still cpufreq was the issue.

Back then I just thought "my bad", but actually it turns out that cpufreq ondemand is/was just utterly broken for this scenario (CPU/GPU interaction). There is no other word for it.

So, yes, it is plausible that nvidia binary OpenGL also benefits. However it may also be the cause that they do sth. in their module already while a game is running to prevent the problem, but just did not do the same thing for VDPAU.

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In following the AMD Radeon performance is incredible on Linux 3.12 article that benchmarked ten different AMD graphics cards on the Linux kernel, followed by the reason why AMD Radeon graphics are faster on Linux 3.12, here's now some benchmarks of the open-source NVIDIA driver with GeForce graphics cards. The testing in this article is a few NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with the Nouveau driver when comparing the Linux 3.11 and 3.12 kernels in a similar fashion to the AMD Linux OpenGL performance testing. Like the AMD results, there are some notable gains to find with the yet-to-be-released 3.12 kernel.

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Very very nice. What about testing the governor performace vs. ondemand? Regarding power consumption, heat and FPS...
Thanks, Michael!

He already tested the fps. The 3.12 kernel fixed the ondemand so that it now performs just as well as far as fps are concerned. (They made it more sticky, when pushed into a higher state, it will wait longer before going back to a lower frequency)

He says he will be testing the ondemand power consumption in the next article. Don't know if it will be just a comparison with itself or if he will also compare it to performance.